Letter #56

Hello hello everyone!

 

Well this was another great week in china town! I love this place. Our baptisms last Sunday went so well! Hou jie Mei is what we like to call a feisty one. She came in and wanted to be baptized in a week but at first I really don’t think that she understood why. She had a friend getting baptized and she just knew that Christianity was a good thing.  In our lessons we would try hard to get her to feel the spirit, but it was hard for us to really get her attention. It was not until se received the gift of the Holy Ghost that you could just see it hit her. We had to confirm right after the baptism because we are having general conference this weekend so we did not want to wait two weeks. Our ward mission leader put his hands on her head and confirmed her. He was completely overcome by the spirit. He did not know anything about her background. As he started to confirm her, he talked about her like they were best friends. The spirit was so strong. When she looked up from being confirmed, there were tears in her eyes. She held her heart and said my heart is beating so fast.. It was perfect! It was just what she needed to be completely converted to the gospel. Her husband wants to be baptized next week, so we are excited for that as well.

This week, we also decided we needed to find some more investigators, so we spent a lot more time contacting. We did not find a ton of people but I am very excited about the ones that we did find. They were all very nice. One of my favorite finds was named Yin…she was from Beijing. It is very rare that we meet people from Beijing… people around here are usually from southeast china, but people from there are always funny. They love it when you tell them that they have very educated Chinese. It makes them all happy. So when I first walked up to this lady, she was not really very interested. She said that she had a church and she did not need to find another one. I had a feeling just to try to get to know her. The more questions I asked about her, the slower and slower she walked, until finally she came to a complete stop. We talked on the side of the busy street for about 30 minutes. She really started to open up and tell me different things about her life. And in the end of it all, SHE started talking to me about church… I did not even have to say anything. She told me that in China, she saw a card in Chinese that was about our church and has always wanted to learn about it. I am not sure what will happen with this but I had a very good feeling about it.

We also had a really cool lesson experience. An English class student asked us to give her some personal English lessons. We agreed that we would and we were planning on sharing a lesson with her after we helped her. We had found out that her brother had just died, so we figured the plan of salvation would be a great way to start off teaching her. On the day of our lesson with her, another English class student saw us helping her and wanted to join in on the party. We taught them a lot of English and then started into the plan of salvation. As soon as we started the lesson, the lady that we were planning on teaching completely checked out of the lesson. She started looking down, studying English as we spoke to her, the whole ten yards. But, the other English class student… leaned foreword in her seat and her eyes widened with interest. When we got to the part about families living together forever in the celestial kingdom, she said really? In a very excited tone. It is incredible what heavenly father will do to get one of his children to hear the gospel. Another great example of his love for us.

Yesterday our mission had a great mission conference. I really took so much out of it. He share a story that Elder Boyd k Packard shared long ago. It was about a man going up into his attic and finding a really old picture of his grandfather that had just passed away. It was a beautiful picture, but the frame that it was in was old, and thrashed. He got a screwdriver and began to dismantle this frame so that he could get out the picture. But as he did, he noticed that under much dust and debris laid a beautiful golden frame. He cleaned off the frame and was so excited to see how beautiful it was. He used this analogy for the missionaries in our mission. He told us that we were all of great worth and sometimes because of investigators not progressing, and not many baptisms we will feel useless. But we are still beautiful golden frames! This made me feel very good.

Well guys thanks for all of the love and support! It really does make me feel so good. I love you guys! Have a great week.

Elder Barton